Ransdell's approach is provocative. He begins:
"[1] The thesis of my paper is that it is doubtful that any distinction should be drawn between empirical and nonempirical semiotics or even between experimental and nonexperimental semiotics. Doing so tends to reproduce within the semiotics movement the present academic distinction between the sciences and the humanities which semiotics should aim at discouraging, rather than reinforcing. But to overcome this undesirable dichotomy, it is necessary to disentangle the conceptions of the experiential, the experimental and the empirical from certain other complexes of ideas with which they have become associated by accident rather than necessity."
Cap Tip Steven
I would toss in the following. All signs - trillions per day - are potentially empirical if we mean that all signs can pass through the process of blunt truth to the result of synthesis in a tangible result. What we have as empirically proved (for the moment) are the result of a community process continually amended as time passes. There is no boundary between science and reality. There is as suggested above no distinction between the sciences and the humanities and today both suffer from creating rigid and false distinctions between the two.
